Fusion Cities

Two cities divided by a border are growing together. The moving particles of this inter-cultural exchange leave their footprint in the landscape – the urban landscape. A border is a thin line between them, an area like an enclave or an undefined moving line, sometimes not even visible.
In the course we will analyze the original state of the cities and how it got reformed by the exchange through the years.
What is strongly restricted by the border? (people, goods, …)
What does not care about the border? (internet, climate, geography, culture …)
Switching from border and flows (network/negative space) to city (footprint/positive space) and back again we will draw maps and diagrams to compare the several pairs of fusion cities.

During the seminar of the summer term 2009 at PAR, TU Darmstadt, the students analyzed four different types of borders: natural, artificial, political, and social. Three analytical steps were taken by the students: borders, cities, movements to then finally distill a still image ‘consolidation of movement’.

BRAKIN_natural : Brazzaville and Kinshasa by Humerto Sarabio as hus and Marion Bouchard as mab
SAN JUANA_artificial : San Diego and Tijuana by Julio Obregon Zepeda as juo and Anne Touchet as ant
JERUSALEM_political : East and West Jerusalem by Slobodan Subotić as sls and Petko Gogov as peg
FAVEMINIO_social : Favela and Condominio in Rio de Janeiro by Eleni Sougaris as els

The language of this book here is mostly visual, which enables the viewer to an intuitive comparison of each of the fusion cities and the analytical steps.

Enjoy, it was made for that,
Jula-Kim Sieber